Waking as an exercise. Ἀνάνηφε — "sober up"; ἀνακαλοῦ σεαυτόν — "call yourself back." Marcus addresses himself as a sleeper who must be roused. This is a pure formula of EXERCISEπροσοχή, attention: the ordinary state of consciousness is equated with sleep, from which one must wake. The governing discipline is assent — it concerns how to treat the contents of one's own mind.

Dreams and waking. The logic of a double waking: (1) in sleep, visions troubled you; on waking you realised they were "only dreams" (ὄνειροι) — and they lost their power. (2) Now, already awake, look at what troubles you (ταῦτα — "these," the surrounding affairs and fears) with the same sober optic with which you look at a dispersed dream. What seems fearsome in waking life is just as untested a "presentation" as a nightmare. Though the word φαντασία is not used here, the passage is an applied case of the Stoic critique of impressions: give no assent to a troubling image until you have looked at it soberly.

Parallels. The theme of "life as a dream from which philosophy wakes us" recalls the image of sleepers who each have "their own world" (Heraclitus, DK 22 B89) and the Stoic call to the waking of reason. Within the corpus it stands beside 06-30 (to keep oneself such as "philosophy wished to make" one) and the general discipline of assent.